Currently more and more vehicles, including cars and trucks, are running on the road, and as such there are great needs to recognize and manage identification of these vehicles for a variety of occasions (for example, at parking lots, or at toll stations).
In a typical vehicle identification method that is widely employed in many current technologies, a camera arranged at an entrance captures an image of a license plate (typically a combination of characters, letters, and numbers) of a vehicle. Then the image is analyzed by a license plate identification device to thereby extract the license plate number. Next the license plate number of the vehicle that has been extracted from the image is compared with records of license plate numbers pre-stored in a database: if any record in the database matches with the license plate number of the vehicle, the identification information of the vehicle can thus be successfully recognized, whereas if no matching record is found in the database, the identification information of the vehicle cannot be recognized.
However, the vehicle identification method as described above has a high requirement for the distance for recognition. Typically, the distance between the vehicle and the camera at the entrance needs to be sufficiently short to allow the camera to clearly capture images of license plate numbers of the vehicles. As such, the above vehicle identification method has significant limitations in real practice.